Man accused of 1979 kidnap and murder of Etan Patz in New York has conviction overturned

Australia Broadcast Center

22-07-2025

The man convicted of one of America's most infamous and tragic cold cases will face a fresh trial, a federal appeals court has ordered, 45 years after the presumed killing of New York schoolboy Etan Patz.
Patz's disappearance on his way to a school bus stop in Manhattan rattled the city, and was unsolved for decades before Pedro Hernandez was convicted of the killing in 2017.
But that conviction has now been overturned and Hernandez will face a new trial, where his confession to the crime will be under scrutiny.
Here's what to know about the young boy's disappearance and why Hernandez's conviction has been overturned.
Patz was a first grader who always wanted "to do everything that adults did", his mother, Julie Patz, told jurors in 2017.
So on the morning of May 25, 1979, she agreed her son could walk by himself to the school bus stop, two blocks away.
It was the first time he was allowed to go alone, and the last time she saw her son.
When Patz did not come home from school that day, his parents reported him missing and the police searched for him for weeks.
For decades, his parents kept the same apartment and even phone number in case he might try to reach them.
Patz's body has never been found, and a civil court declared him dead in 2001.
Hernandez was a teenager working at a convenience store in the neighbourhood when Patz vanished.
Police met him while canvassing the area but didn't suspect him until 2012, when they got a tip from a relative.
He had made remarks during a prayer group years earlier about having killed a child in New York.
While there was no physical evidence against Hernandez, police said he confessed during a seven-hour interrogation to luring Patz into the store's basement by offering him a soft drink.
Hernandez said he choked the young boy because "something just took over me".
Hernandez said he put Patz, still alive, in a "garbage bag" before stuffing him into a box and leaving it outside with a pile of rubbish.
In one of the recorded confessions, he added that he'd wanted to tell someone, "but I didn't know how to do it. I felt so sorry".
Hernandez, however, later recanted and pleaded not guilty to murder.
His lawyers said the admissions were the false imaginings of a man with mental illness, low intelligence and a propensity towards vivid hallucinations.
But in 2017, Hernandez was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.
This was his second trial; the first in 2015 ended in a hung jury after 18 days of deliberations.
"After all these years we finally know what dark secret you had locked in your heart," Etan's father, Stanley Patz, said at the sentencing.
Hernandez's lawyers have long argued that their client's mental illness and the circumstances of his confession undermined the fairness of the 2017 trial.
In a ruling on Monday, local time, a federal appeals court said the trial judge gave a "clearly wrong" and "manifestly prejudicial" response to a jury note during the trial.
The note addressed how the jury should interpret recordings of the police interrogation in which Hernandez confessed.
Police said he initially confessed before they read him his Miranda rights — a constitutionally mandated warning about self-incrimination.
Immediately after, he was given a legally required warning that his statements could be used against him in court, and was asked to repeat his confession on tape.
Several hours later, he did so again for a federal prosecutor.
At the trial, jurors sent repeated queries about the multiple confessions.
The last inquiry asked whether they had to disregard the two recorded confessions, if they concluded that the first one — given before the Miranda warning — was invalid.
The judge said "no".
The appeals court ruled that the jury should have received a more thorough explanation of its options, which could have included disregarding all of the confessions as improperly obtained.
The court ordered Hernandez's release unless the 64-year-old gets a new trial within a "reasonable period".
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the case, said it was reviewing the decision.
Patz's missing persons campaign attracted national attention and became a cautionary tale during the 80s.
The six-year-old was one of the first children whose disappearance was publicised in what became a high-profile way: on billboards and milk cartons.
His case also ushered in an age of parental anxiety around child safety.
Parents became more protective of kids who were once allowed to roam and play unsupervised in their neighbourhoods.
The Patzs' advocacy also helped establish a national missing-children hotline.
US president Ronald Reagan marked the anniversary of the boy's disappearance in 1983, proclaiming it National Missing Children's Day.